There's a fantastic article in the Guardian today, written by Kira Cochrane who is one of my ever present girl crushes. The article is huge in scope and covers a massive variety of frightening topics including rape conviction rates, inequalities in the work place, the shocking lack of funding for women's charities (I've read the statistic a million times but it still enrages me that sick donkeys get more money than battered women on this isle of mine), the increasing prevelance of the sex trade and my own pet subject:
In gossip magazines, women's bodies are pored over - a pound gained provoking headlines that they're fat, a pound lost leading to headlines that they're too thin. Circles are drawn around a spot on their ankle where they've failed to apply fake tan, around a bitten nail or a tiny, incipient wrinkle beside their eye - which could just be a stray lash. What is implicit but unsaid is that there is no objective standard of beauty, no level of perfection that a woman could reach at which her body would be perceived as acceptable and in control. In the eyes of these magazines, a healthy body mass index could be considered seriously plump. A woman deemed too fat in one magazine could, on the basis of exactly the same picture, be deemed too thin by another magazine. The constant message is that women's bodies are not our own. They belong to everyone but us, and are there to be picked apart. Women can try to curry favour, come up to snuff, spend hours like, say, Madonna, working out, perfecting themselves. But there's then every chance that they will be derided for the veins on their hands. There's something essentially depressing about women being derided for their veins
I suggest you go and read the whole thing, I'm already trying to work out a way of forcing everyone I come into contact with into reading and understanding it. Maybe that would make my day to day interactions bearable.
UPDATE: Apparently the ladies over at Jezebel agree with me.
4 comments:
Sadly, this body image shit has been so vigorously ingrained in us that try as we might it's damn hard to shake. Here I am battling leukemia, and my biggest fret right now is the fact that I've lost muscle tone in my legs and my tummy looks like the inside of a kid's bouncy castle. Despite my best efforts to let go and focus on healing myself, this desire to be trim still manages to dig its claws in pretty tight.
Grrrrr. I suck.
Yeah, people keeping asking me why I seem so angry all the time. I should just carry around copies of this article to hand out whenever necessary.
And Manda, I know what you've mean. I've gained about 10-15 pounds in the last year that anyone who was not me or my parents would be hard pressed to identify where it was on my body. If I didn't tell people, they'd never guess it. Still bothers me.
Yep, the body image thing is completely toxic.
As for me: I'm working massively hard on self acceptance at the moment and stopping my continual catty commentary about other people (not their clothing though, I still think I have a right to be bitchy about that) - and yet I still catch myself thinking "at least I'm not as fat as that" from time to time and am utterly disgusted with myself.
More work required.
*Sigh* I generally have a pretty healthy self-image, but I'd like to be more physically fit. Not just because it looks good, but mainly because of how it feels. You know...the idea that I can run for 1 hour without collapsing in a heap or that I can keep up with my 2 year old nephew (an unattainable goal, but noble). Of course, there's also that part of me that wants to wear a tight fitting dress without worrying about bumps in all the wrong places. :)
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